Will Social Media Consultants Practice What They Preach?

In the past eighteen months, most companies have come to accept social media as an inescapable part of their marketing and communications. And most stop right there. Social media’s just another way to message, advertise and market.

Only a few brands have embraced it as a conversational tool with the power to transform their businesses.

As I’m a social media consultant, I’m more than a little saddened that the greatest conversational medium of our lifetime is becoming a one-way messaging tool for selling energy drinks and sleeping pills. But I don’t blame the companies for lacking vision. In fact, I blame social media “experts,” who are too scared to show companies how to use the medium to its fullest potential.

For four years now, I’ve had a front-row seat at the bizarre spectacle of a closed field–consulting–preaching the gospel of open&#8212social media. Heck, I’ve been onstage, delivering the same sermon myself. Here’s how it goes:

Big Multinational Brand, we know that you’ve always done your marketing by controlling your brand and pushing your message. But that’s so last millennium! If you want connect with the kids–all those young spenders who live on Facebook and SMS–you have to play by the rules of social media.

So let me, Tiny Social Media Start-up, tell you how to do it right. You have to be open and transparent, and tell people what’s really going on with your company. You have to spend lots of money creating great videos and fancy web sites, and then you have to give them to your customers for free. And if you really want to be hip, you have to do it all using open source software, open standards, and with a Creative Commons license.

Here’s the fun part. Re-read that block, except this time, swap the two bolded nouns’ placement. All that transparency? Well, we all know that successful consulting is based on accumulating lots of proprietary methodologies and saleable intellectual property, so you won’t catch any of us telling people how our sausages are made.

But imagine reversing that sermon: imagine telling social media consultants like me that we are the ones who need to stop pushing our message and controlling our brand. Imagine telling us to follow the advice we’ve been giving to our corporate clients.

All that transparency? Well, we all know that successful consulting is based on accumulating lots of proprietary methodologies and saleable intellectual property, so you won’t catch any of us telling people how our sausages are made.

The free content? You can find lots of tips and summaries on our blogs (read: our marketing materials, our messaging). But don’t insult the value of our labour as intellectual property creators by asking us to give you the deliverables for free.

Open what? Sure, we’re happy to build all our sites with the code created by open source developers–just don’t ask us to open source the strategies we use to build them.

It’s a double standard that has helped social media agencies like mine build profitable businesses, but it’s a terrible recipe for building an entire field, especially one like social media, where transparency and openness carry real value, where everyone’s success is essential to anyone’s success. Once you remove the openness, you remove the communities and conversations, the joys of connection, expression and discovery, that brought people to the social web in the first place.

The best way for social media “experts” to make the case for openness is by being open themselves. Not just the comfortable openness of sharing their wisdom and successes, but the painful, profound and transformative openness of sharing their shortcomings, their uncertainties, and yes, their trade secrets.

But we don’t really do that. We still follow the traditional business practice of keeping content close, and methodologies closer. Too many practitioners tell other businesses and organizations to share, share, share, but keep their own trade secrets locked away and their clients dependent. We preach the value of conversation, but the one thing we won’t talk about is how we run our own businesses and do our own work.

And then we are surprised by clients who “don’t get it” and insist on using social media as a traditional, message-push marketing vehicle?

The best social media consultants lead by example. Consultants and agencies that promise to unlock the secrets of the social web need to stop selling transparency and authenticity, and start living it. And the companies who buy their services–the communications and marketing professionals who face the tough job of selling transparency within their own organizations–need to insist on the same level of transparency from their suppliers.

We’re as scared as all the big brands who fall into using social media for PR–because using it for conversation is even more frightening. We’re as scared as all the other consultants who preach open, but are too frightened to live it. We’re scared because no one really knows the business model yet. No one is sure that if they walk the walk, they’ll profit from it. Even if they do, they’re not sure how to tell if they’re profiting from it. Companies are, more than anything, conservative. Social media is still reasonably radical. And radical is terrifying to business.

But fear goes with the territory of embracing a medium in which you succeed only by being open and transparent, and letting your customers see you as you really are. Established companies that have put their own brands on the line by engaging on Twitter and Facebook already know about that fear.

They know more about it than some of the consultants telling them to do it.

Alexandra Samuel is CEO of Social Signal, a social media agency. She helps companies and organizations increase revenue, build brand and strengthen team relationships by creating compelling online communities and social web presences. She holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University. Follow Alex on Twitter at twitter.com/awsamuel.

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